Dry chicken breasts are a myth

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A few Fridays ago, I roasted a chicken. Because it was Friday! While I don’t observe the Sabbath—we lit no candles, sang no prayers—I will enthusiastically take advantage of the occasion to cook something a little more elaborate than usual.

My process is this: I spatchcock the bird, cutting out its back and tossing that in a pot with the neck, two extra wings, an onion, bay leaves, and salt, and set it to simmer into stock while I prep the roast. I scatter my large cast-iron pan with an onion or two cut into quarters, a thatch of thyme, half a head of garlic, and some small potatoes. I salt it all and drizzle with good olive oil, then I lay the chicken on top and rub a lot more salt into its skin, along with smoked paprika and, often, za’atar. I put it into the oven at 444°F for 55 minutes, and it’s done!

I’ll take the chicken out, lay it on a cutting board, and remove everything else from the pan into a serving dish, then set it back on the stove, on medium-high heat, until the remaining bits start to sizzle. I’ll add a big spoonful of miso, or a handful of halved cherry tomatoes, or both, and when those have cooked down a bit, in goes a cup of white wine and/or the quick chicken stock, and once that’s reduced, I whisk in two tablespoons of butter just until they’ve melted. I pour everything through a strainer into a serving bowl, making sure I squish out every bit of juice, and I’ve got a fine pan sauce.

Then, since I’ve also made a simple green salad while the chicken was cooking, it’s time to eat.

We are nothing if not predictable in my family. The kids take drumsticks and wings. Jean opts for the thigh. And me, I take the breast.

Naturally, I feel guilty about this. Dark meat is obviously where it’s at—everyone knows. I know it, too. Duh. But I take the breast so that my wife and children can have the better, tastier morsels all to themselves. I am sacrificing my own enjoyment for their sakes. Because I am just that kind of selfless human being.

But also because the breast meat of the chickens I roast tastes good. Not as good as the thigh, of course, but so good and so juicy, in fact, that I no longer understand the commonly held belief that chicken breasts are dry, chewy, flavorless. Where did that come from?

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Despite the headline above, I don’t mean to suggest that dry chicken breasts are, you know, a myth. They are, sadly, tragically, real. Whenever my family orders fried chicken from Popeye’s—about once every seven weeks, because the shop is near my barber—we struggle to ensure the employees there give us nothing but dark meat. We usually fail, and it usually falls to me to attempt to consume the inevitably dry and flavorless breast meat. Truly I’m baffled that a fast-food chain dedicated to frying chicken is so inept when it comes to (white) Americans’ favorite piece of the bird.

It’s not hard to ruin chicken breasts. All you have to do is overcook them. This is especially easy if you are cooking the breasts and no other cuts, and virtually guaranteed if those breasts are skinless. But if you are choosing to cook and eat boneless, skinless chicken breasts, then I really can’t help you here¹ . Might I suggest at least leaving the skin on and stuffing them with herbed goat cheese?

When roasting a full bird, it’s more difficult to fuck up. To overcook a normal, 3½-to-4-pound bird, you’d really have to let it go a long time—which I guess some people do, perhaps in fear that the best bits (the thighs) might remain undercooked, killing their families and dinner guests. But there are just so, so many ways to monitor this, by poking a knife into that spot under the thigh and seeing if the juices run clear, not red, or by using a cooking thermometer to gauge doneness. What temperature should you aim for? I don’t know, but maybe google does?

Or you could just spatchcock the damn thing and bake it at 444°F for 55 minutes!

To be clear, I’m also not using a fancy chicken, although I prefer to go a step above Perdue and Tyson. Mine are usually Bell & Evans, Murray’s, Whole Foods brand, or sometimes Giannone—$3.49 a pound, give or take. But these ain’t poulets de Bresse. They’re rarely even organic.

Nor am I doing anything special to the chicken apart from patting it dry with a paper towel. I don’t brine, I don’t dry-brine, I no longer stuff a compound butter (lemon zest, garlic, thyme) under the skin, and I don’t let the chicken air out in the refrigerator overnight, partly because my fridge is too crowded, partly I can’t plan that far ahead. If you want to do those things, by all means dry-brine your heart out! It will probably make your chicken taste better than mine. But let’s not pretend it’s some magical method of ensuring tender, juicy breast meat. Because that requires no magic at all, just lots of salt and a pair of kitchen shears.

In fact, most cooking requires no magic. If you buy decent-quality ingredients and prepare them simply and mindfully—i.e., don’t put the chicken in the oven then go off to watch The Brutalist—you will generally eat well and be happy. That’s it! You can certainly get more complicated, spend more time (and more money), deploy more skill, but as I’ve argued before, “good enough” is more than good enough.

When I started thinking about this piece, I wondered: Should I include a proper recipe for my roast chicken? You know: ingredient list, precise measurements, numbered steps. Would you, dear subscriber, even want such a thing?

Finally, I decided. Nope! It’s not that I don’t want to write, or that you and the rest of the Internet wouldn’t appreciate, another classic roast chicken recipe that promises no dry breast meat! It’s that the classical recipe style is a problem for me.

Your standard recipe goes like this: Ingredients are listed in the order that they will be used, but water is almost always omitted. (Everyone has water, the thinking goes, and if you don’t, maybe you shouldn’t be cooking at all.) The measurements aim for precision—teaspoons and cups, ounces and, for baking, grams—except when they don’t. (How many scallions in a “bunch”? How do you measure a “medium” head of cabbage?) The instructions are broken down into clear steps and written in an unadorned imperative, unless you are lucky enough to be Alison Roman or Molly Bas, in which case you can insert some occasional personality and voice. Ideally, a recipe should let you know what to expect at the outset, then fulfill those expectations exactly—no more or less than what was promised.

Good recipes are works of beautiful discipline: accuracy, restraint, usefulness. If they feel like magic, it’s the magic of mathematics, of physics—they are finely wrought equations of joy and satisfaction.

But recipes are all too often blind to their own biases. They pretend to an objectivity that doesn’t necessarily exist, and they treat the reader—the cook—as a single, undifferentiated object: competent, but not too competent (else why would they need a recipe?). Sure, some recipes are explicitly written for beginners, while others (e.g., those in Modernist Cuisine) are clearly for professionals and obsessives. Too often, they read like dutiful Associated Press news stories—written for everyone, and therefore maybe for no one.

This failing is one wrought by form, by tradition, and especially by lack of imagination (which is likely a consequence of form and tradition). What I want from a recipe is what I want from any piece of writing: for it to imagine me, the reader, into being. What kind of cook does a recipe want me to be? A careful, measure-everything type? A dinner-party host aiming for Michelin stars? A rank newbie? A seasoned weeknight family “chef”? At ease with a vast range of soy sauces and chili peppers? Cursed with dull knives and a cramped kitchen? Squidgy about seafood but adventurous with offal?

The best (or at least most popular) recipe writers are extremely good at this. Alison Roman and Claire Saffitz let readers imagine that they are just like them: cool and fun and talented, surrounded by equally cool, talented, fun friends, with whom they enjoy wonderful meals and treats all the time. Ditto Ina Garten, Rachael Ray, Samin Nosrat² . It’s a fantasy, of course, but no more a fantasy than pretending an “objective” recipe can be all things to all people.

And so when I opened this piece with my own roast chicken “recipe,” I was imagining a reader much like myself: someone who has cooked enough birds to understand both the process and the possibilities. What I need, and what I hope you need, from a recipe is guidance, not prescription. We’re all adults here, we have a solid sense of our own tastes and abilities, and we are seeking not only reassurance (that our previous experience was not all wrong) but a bit of insight: Ah, I’d never thought of that before! Must try next time. Everyone needs a coach now and then, and I suppose that’s what I was trying to be.

And now I’ll put on my coach voice one last time to let you know: Stop worrying about your chicken breasts. They’re going to be fine. Turkey, though? Oof. There’s a subject for another day. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: This Food-Writing Retreat

My friend Hannah Kirshner is organizing a retreat at her awesome renovated home in Japan—along with awesome cookbook writer Clarissa Wei, for whose Made in Taiwan I got to test a few recipes. If you can get yourself to Yamanaka Onsen in September, you should go!

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Read a Previous Attempt: Luigi Mangione Edition

1  Protein-craving powerlifters are exempted from my sneer.

2  Are there any male recipe writers to add to this list? I feel like men far too often go for the “objective” approach to recipe-writing—because they like to imagine that they are always right?